En Francais, s'il vous plait

I had planned, before we came to Montreal, to study and try to improve my French a little bit. I use Duolingo for Spanish, and I thought that I'd just add an additional language and practice for a few minutes a day. And then all of a sudden it was the day before our trip, and I hadn't practiced at all. Zut, alors.

I took two years of French in high school, switching to Spanish during my junior year. I also took an additional semester of French in college. After that, I hardly ever spoke or read anything in French, so I was well out of practice. I also took only two years of Spanish, but everyone who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland can speak a little bit of Spanish; and between hearing Spanish spoken every day and practicing with Duolingo, I can get by in Spanish; or at least, I can follow a conversation.

But when in Montreal, I like to do as the Montrealers do, and I've been trying to speak French as much as possible, with limited success. I get a little better each day, though.

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I don't have much of a talent for languages, other than my own. It's humbling to realize that even as I gain a little bit of competency in basic French conversation (lentement, s'il vous plait!) I will never, and I mean NEVER, achieve real fluency.

I'm an editor, so when I read signs or posters, especially long signs (pool rules, for example), I edit and rewrite them in my mind. The English-language rules posted at the hotel pool, for example, are badly written. This might be because a French speaker wrote them; but I've been to enough pools in the United States to know that it's just as likely that they were written by a native English speaker--pool rules signs are always badly written for some reason. After I finished my edit, the sign was stripped of unnecessary capital letters (another Grammar/Punctuation Derangement Syndrome trigger) and altogether much better and more clearly written, in my mind. But the French sign? Who knows? Even as I congratulated myself for being able to understand 70 percent of the sign without referring to the English version, I realized that I had NO IDEA if it was grammatically correct. That sign could be a morass of bad grammar and poor word choices; and riddled with spelling and typographical errors, and I'd be clueless. Humbling.

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So this morning, we visited the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal. My favorite exhibit was "Les Prophetes," a collection of tiny creations made of string and bits of wood and plastic and colored paper, all marked with handwritten labels. Each of the pieces is a three-dimensional representation of an economic statistic of some sort. I picked up an exhibit guide, but haven't read enough yet to know whether or not the statistics are real or made up for the sake of the project.

It looks so cheerful, n'est-ce pas? Actual
caption: "Work Fatalities in Europe by Country." 

I loved this for two reasons. The world (meaning the part of the world in which I live and work) is preoccupied with "metrics," to an unhealthy extent, and I like the idea that each of these metrics can be reduced to nothing more than colors and shapes, no more meaningful than the string and colored paper they're made of. I also loved the finicky care with which each of the pieces is assembled and labeled. I pictured myself at age 11 or so spending weeks constructing and labeling something similar.

"The Unit Simplex." Reminiscent of a Spirograph drawing.

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In the afternoon, we went to the Montreal Botanic Garden, taking our first ride on the Montreal Metro, which is very much like the Washington, DC Metro. Pie IX station deposits you right at Montreal's Olympic Stadium, which is certainly the ugliest place in Montreal, and maybe one of the ugliest in North America. On a hot day, there's nothing less inviting than a nearly all-concrete stadium, as they were built in the early 1970s. To call the Olympic stadium reminiscent of East Germany strikes me as unfair to East Germany, which after all, I have never visited. Maybe it was pretty and cheerful in 1976. In 2018, it's a parched, sun-baked concrete bowl, marked by graffiti, its cracked walkways overgrown with weeds and unshaded by even a single tree. We didn't inquire about the tour.

The Botanic Garden, however, is beautiful and exactly the remedy for the soul-crushing malaise of the Olympic stadium. I took lots of pictures there. Here is one.

It's a flower. I have no idea what kind. 

It's 9 PM now, and time to swim. Mont Royal and St. Joseph's Oratory tomorrow. Au revoir a demain.